The Houses of the Future have arrived in Circular Quay and tomorrow it will go away to Melbourne for a short while before being trucked off to that other utopian wonderland, Homebush Bay.

There are six prototype houses on display. Each is a one bedroom house and each one uses a particular material as its primary strucure; cardboard, glass, concrete, timber, clay, steel. While the suburbs sprawl out of control with transport and infrastructure unable to keep the pace it seems somewhat absurd to propose detached one bedroom houses as an answer. Urban issues do not seem to be a concern here however,

Cardboard House Of The Future was an interesting examination of a new building material. The house takes the form of a no nonsense a-frame structure and ideas of prefabrication and tectonics have been taken seriously, resulting in a clear expression of materiality. Whilst it is true that the house needs to be wrapped in plastic for weather protection and the public are unable to enter it for fear that it may not take the load, it is also the one house on display that pushes its chosen material to try something new.

The real shame was that each of the laminated cardboard elements had been wrapped in brown paper, presumably as some kind of weather protection, concealing the corrugated edge of each element. It is this corrugation that has given other experiments in cardboard their character and without out it the Cardboard house has lost much of its meaning.

Further along, the Clay and Glass Houses Of The Future were vaguely forgettable. The former using clay bricks and tiles in a manner that I associate with Regular Houses of the Present, the latter resembling a trade show exhibition stand. To be fair, the Glass House used nanotechnology to keep the glass clean but until nanotechnology can be used to insert Dennis Quaid into my bloodstream I am not listening.

The Steel house Of The Future posits the theory that in the future steel will continue to be used to reinforce the hackneyed cultural stereotype of the ‘house as woolshed’. You will note that the Hair of the Future was also present at the Steel House Of The Future.

Perhaps the saddest display was that of the Timber House Of The Future. This house was introduced at the launch of the Houses of the Future talk at the Sydney Town Hall as being generated from the idea of a mobius strip. Alarm bells rang at this point and the final product has done nothing to quieten them. One of the requirements of the brief was that the house must be prefabricated, able to be loaded onto a truck and erected in four hours. Given that the house is still under construction a day before the exhibition is to be pulled down, it is fair to say that perhaps timber will not make the grade in the future of housing. Which will not please Ric Le Plastrier in the year he was awarded The Spirit of Nature: Wood, but such is life. In addition to not being finished, the Timber House Of The Future was chunky, angular and clad in checkerplate steel - a long way from the supple folded surfaces of the design concept and even further from the complexities suggested by a mobius strip.

The timber house of the future is a compelling argument to leave the shape making to those with the skill to resolve its complex geometries. I would suggest that the only people who fit within this category reside in Spain and Japan and that they most certainly do not reside in The Rocks, Sydney.

The Concrete House was weighty and inviting. It may look like a toilet block in the photo below but liked it a great deal regardless. It also contained The Shower Rose Of The Future { no photo, sorry…} an evil looking affair of chrome and spikiness.

It is easy to poke fun at the way in which the future has been imagined. There is little chance of getting it right and every chance to make a fool of ones self but it is an opportunity to explore ideas. I can accept that 2001: A Space Odyssey got it wrong. In the sixties the future was full of optimism and hope; ideas were in evidence and they were pushed to their limits. The vision of the future in Circular Quay contains very little optimism and much pragmatism.

The clay house should have looked to clay for inspiration; casting, moulding and firing are very evocative ideas that were ignored in favour of choosing wacky benchtop colours. A glass house should be an essay in transparency, refraction and reflection and what we got was a pavilion that felt as though it should be advertising Caroma tapware. Steel is light, able to span long distances; it can do more than evoke the banality of a shed. The cardboard, concrete and timber houses went the furthest in examining the potential of their material - that the timber house failed so spectacularly is likely a function of its ambition.

There were also no robots present. Correct me if I am wrong but for all the secrets the future may be keeping from us, pretty much everyone agrees there will be robots.

There is a chilling article in Saturday’s Good Weekend section of the Sydney Morning Herald. The weekly column ‘two of us’ that takes a couple and talks about their relationship from the two different perspectives this week tackles Sydney Architecture Power Couple, Davina Jackson and Chris Johnson. The article charts their adulturous relationship and the subsequent clandestine relationship {although I am not sure that a relationship built around dancing in nightclubs can really be classed as clandestine} to their secret holiday in Bali after which they were found out by Chris’ children and on to their power-brokingness and squabbling over Melbourne versus Sydney nonsense. I have been unable to find an online version of the article so for those that have not read of the horrors themselves, following are some quotable quotes:

“She’s like electricity, the current is either running or its not. She can switch you off.”

“I get enormous intellectual stimulus from Chris. We are in effect, a think tank about architecture. I’m not as soft and romantic as he is. I’m a brisk New Zealander - no nonsense, blunt. But when I say I’m not romantic, I’m fairly sexy with him. Don’t think he gets no action.”

mmmm.

It was a refreshing change to go and see Micheal C Place {Build} talk at the Powerhouse Museum last Thursday. Place was in Australia as a guest of Refill magazine to help launch issue four of their magazine. After a steady diet of architecture related talks, I realise now that I attend these things with a heavy dose of cynicism pre attached. I generally know what I am going to get when going to an architecture talk; Glenn or Harry rallying the troops to take up arms against local councils, Chris Johnson spruiking his new book and placing himself in a lineage that includes Francis Greenway and Walter Liberty Vernon, some young firm reinventing the lean-to and so on. I have baggage in this department.

In comparison I know next to nothing about graphic design; its professional bickering, its cliques, whether I should prefer vectors over pixels, if digital printing onto canvass is taboo, if deleuze’s fold has infiltrated their university courses, whatever. It pretty much all impresses me. As such I sat there for the duration of the talk, in awe of the talent on display.

Refill Issue four in its bag > the magazine and some of the other stuff in the bag > Build poster

Obviously more comfortable in front of a screen than talking in front of an audience, to start Place was nervous to the point of distraction. Constant scratching and the occasional asthma puffer puff punctuated the opening ten, fifteen minutes of the talk where he ran through his life story - son of a pig farmer, drawing spaceships as a kid, studying graphic design, early jobs and finally his ten {nine?} year stint at Designers Republic where he hit his stride and developed his trademark style.

When he began talking about setting up his own firm, Build, and the work that he has been producing under that banner, he eased up, the scratching became less frequent and he fell into his stride. This work is relentlessly creative, methodical and obsessive. The potentials of printed matter are explored through the use of different types of inks and stock. In particular one project for a Japanese design journal stuck out where a series of removable vinyl overlays were each printed with a different design and using different inks. When overlaid each other in different arrangements various other designs are revealed.

He is an obviously obsessive designer and like the instruction booklets that he is a keen collector of, each work is packed with a huge amount of data from the dimensions of the artwork, the inks used, the size of the digital file, the date it was created, the symptoms of asthma, the corresponding position of CD tracks on a CD cover, to instructions on where to fold and where to cut. In the three page Asthma and Eczema series, again for a Japanese design journal {and also explaining the incessant scratching}, ventolin puffers are dissected and examined, asthma symptoms spelt out, a tree becomes a lung and thirty minutes worth of scratching is recorded and mapped.

Approached from the position of architecture, perhaps the most compelling aspect of Build’s work is manner in which scale is explored. Form and type are applied at macro and micro level with equal weighting creating compositions that are equally complex on multiple levels. Unable to resist continuing the comparison to architecture it can be likened to the layering of scale in the work of Carlo Scarpa where the detail cannot be discerned from the whole. The result is a kind of self referential, self contained object that operates at many scales.

No seriously, this is an awesome chair.
But US$115.00 for eleven pieces of cardboard….? Whose boat are they trying to float? And the grass seeds are not even included.

I understand that this may be a little off topic but heck, allow me to indulge my geek fantasies.

There is an excellent interview with Neal Stephenson over on slashdot. I have not read any of his novels since Cryptonomicon and this article reminds me that i keep meaning to.

Below is an extract from the interview detailing, in the event of a battle between William Gibson and himself, who would win.

” The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle. “

The rest of the interview is less silly but equally fascinating.

The Scottish Parliament building is finally complete, three years late and four bazillion dollars over budget. Idiosyncratic to the point of absurdity and bordering on ugly, it seems a fitting final statement for the late Enric Miralles. One that I am sure will grow in time to be one of the worlds truly cherished buildings.

The film My Architect is quite good. A documentary by his only son, Nathanial, it examines the life and works of one of the great architects of the last century. All the classics are covered; the Salk Insitute, The Kimbell Art Museum, The Richards Building, The Trenton Bathhouse, the Capital of Bangladesh and so on. The buidings, however are only half the story { ! } as it is explained that Louis Kahn had some questionable person to person social interactions, the types of interactions that led to him having a couple of illegitimate children, one of which happens to be our narrator, Nathanial Kahn. And so the film traces its way around relationships and buildings following them to their inevitable conclusion in a toilet cubicle, Penn Station, New York.

None of this will come as much of a surprise; we all know his architecture, we know his scars dude. What we don’t expect, what we could never foresee, is that the film will feature a scene of Kahn’s son rollerblading around the Salk Institute to the soundtrack of some mournful country and western song. And it is not as though he is having a quick rollerblade around, shredding some pavement, grinding some handrails, no, he is ,like, doing languid figures of eight, hands behind his back looking for all the world like he is about to launch into a graceful triple lutz.

I am absolutely certain that Louis found the gesture both heartwarming and appropriate.

In response, I have compiled a list both real and imagined of inappropriate acts commited in/on great works of architecture. Events that have actually occurred are in bold.

• - Roller blading around the Salk Institute with some crap country song as background music.
• - The Motor Cross leg of X-Games held on the lawns of Asplund’s Cemetery.
• - Parasitic Richard Goodwin sculptures pretty much anywhere.
• - The Australian Idol finale at the Sydney Opera House, with Guy Sebastian taking top honours.
• - Skinny dipping in the pool at the Adelphi Hotel, Melbourne.
• - Playing Putt Putt Golf in the courtyard of Scarpa’s Querini-Stampalia Museum.
• - Snogging a lifesize cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple.

Resplendent in Indeterminancy, shrouded in the Denial Of Visual Expectation, we here at Gravestmor Realty are pleased to announce that we have yet more space to let. This House, the tenth in a series feature all of the el-shifts and decompositional geometric transformations that would be expected from groovy New York architect, Peter Eisenman. Arranged around an axial void, a number of unspecified spaces, solarium, bar and maids quarters, comprise the living areas of the house.

Made manifest in axonometric form only this house is a once in a lifetime opportunity to escape the banality of your orthographic existence.

Download A4